16/02/2026 – 08/03/2026
Week 4 – Week 6
We’ve made it to the second sprint, so here’s the progress made over these 3 weeks.
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Character Design
Below is the chief editor and the anonymous sender. For the chief editor, I wanted to make the facial expressions very obvious in which emotion they were showing, as last year on Violet’s Dates, some feedback we received on the character design was that people wanted to see more exaggerated facial expressions, so with that in mind, I was able to create these designs. The anonymous sender was a lot easier to come up with as the identity isn’t revealed for the majority of the game, so having a silhouette adds to the mystery.
Small update! When we showed Adam a video of the new updates we had made, he mentioned how we had labelled the character that players play “player”, which normally in games it will be labelled “you”, etc., so other than changing that, we also decided to add a player character design just as a small visual detail.
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3D Modelling In Unity
In week 4, I was able to send over the office, apartment, and subway station to Jessie to get it into Unity, finally. Which was exciting to see how well they all worked within the game and instantly added to the overall feel of the game. Jessie did encounter some small issues where she was having to flip some of the elements in Unity, as some of the floors and walls were turning invisible, but it wasn’t anything too major.
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Play test
Week 5 Monday, Jessie and I did a small playtest where we had Maja and Adam try out our game and below is the overall feedback that we received.
My Next Steps
So what are my next steps over the next week and a half? Since Jessie is still working on the final part of the narrative, my 3D modelling is taking a slight pause, but that means I can continue on other elements received in the feedback. After the playtest, I had a conversation with Adam where we discussed the art and how Jessie and I wanted it to look. This is where he talked about looking at old Windows 3.1 for reference, and so in the afternoon, I set out on the task of giving the 2D art an update. So my next steps are ultimately updating the 2D art and making a start on the UI for the game.
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Updated 2D Art & UI
Before I show the new updated 2D art, here was some of our initial starting points, just to show the difference.
Now for the updated look
I’m really happy with this new updated look as it matches the style and time era that we were going for. I also think some of the interactive UI will be easier to understand, as some of the comments that Adam made were that it was sometimes hard to understand what was going on, and so having some more distinctive features will help clear some of that up. Still have more to do, but it was a nice start to the week, and the feedback was very insightful.
Small update! We showed Adam a video of the updated art and UI, and he mentioned it might be helpful to have a logbook for the evidence so players have something to refer back to. It also makes the game feel more interactive, so I went away and created a small book icon and then an open book display where all the information will be stored.
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Updated Evidence
Previously, the evidence was AI-created as a placeholder until we could replace it with our own versions. As I was on the path of already updating the 2D art, I also started to update the evidence. Below, I’ve created the new and improved evidence shown within the game. (more yet to come)
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Testing Characters In Game / Text Colours
Another pointer that Adam made was to have different colour text to help differentiate between who was speaking, so after looking at the colour wheel and seeing what complementary colours would work well with the purpleish tones we had going on me and Jessie agreed that for the chief editor he was going to speak in a blue, for player monologue that will be done in white, for the anonymous sender they will speak in red and for anything computer related we were going to go for green. Below is how some of that would look within the game. (Image quality isn’t the best)
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Video of updated gameplay
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Social Media Post for Sprint 2
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Reflection
Here was what I said I wanted to achieve during weeks 4 – 6
So, how has everything gone? As said last sprint, I was able to achieve a lot more than I expected in terms of 3D modelling, so I actually achieved what I wanted to do this sprint, but that meant that I was able to crack on with the character design and also have time to react to the feedback that Adam gave during our playtest. So equally still on track as I knew that at some point, what we wanted to do versus what we would be doing would change, as the sprints were only a rough estimate.
I’ve still got some UI to make a start on, and I’m hoping I will eventually be able to make a start on the last two 3D models for the game, but for the time being, everything is still going to plan. As of right now, Jessie’s and my next goal is to have a new and improved version of the game ready for when we go to a Studio on the 11th of March and then the science fair on the 14th of March.